Blizzard and Valve have come to an agreement over the DOTA trademark

Blizzard and Valve have agreed to share the trademark for DOTA, according to an announcement from both companies. Under the terms of the agreement, Valve's DOTA 2 will keep its name, while Blizzard DOTA has been renamed Blizzard All-Stars. Blizzard can continue the non-commercial use of the DOTA name in the Battle.net community for player-created maps for Warcraft III and Starcraft II.

"Both Blizzard and Valve recognize that, at the end of the day, players just want to be able to play the games they're looking forward to, so we're happy to come to an agreement that helps both of us stay focused on that," said Rob Pardo, executive vice president of game design at Blizzard Entertainment. "As part of this agreement, we're going to be changing the name of Blizzard DOTA to Blizzard All-Stars, which ultimately better reflects the design of our game. We look forward to going into more detail on that at a later date."

"We're pleased that we could come to an agreement with Blizzard without drawing things out in a way that would benefit no one," said Valve president Gabe Newell. "We both want to focus on the things our fans care about, creating and shipping great games for our communities."

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There are a bunch of MOBA (Mobile Online Battle Arena) type games now. I'd like to see at least one of them try to improve the interface. Maybe something like a simplified Guilty Gear Overture could work, as an example. With so many of these games that might look the same to the consumer base, you'd think one of them would try to stand out by changing up the interface to get players that don't like the control scheme. Unless the newer games are just trying to get players to switch to their game because it executes the same idea a little bit better, which I don't think would be that hard to do if they focus on the competitive aspects of the game and design it around being balanced and diverse and generally fun to play. Hint: make it more aggressive instead of extremely defensive please, and don't release 80 characters, adding to the burden of knowledge that new players have to overcome to get decent at the game, and making it harder to balance the game play.

I was under the impression the M in MOBA stood for Multiplayer (as opposed to, perhaps, Massively Multiplayer or maybe referring to the idea that they have little to no single-player content), but I suppose it doesn't even really matter. It's the other three words that count.